It's still there. The dynamics about how to maximize your chances to get there have changed, though.
As for the intergenerational squabbling... I think both the young'uns and the geezers are right... and underinformed as well. Neither side can relate to the types of struggles and sacrifices the other group made because they were different in many ways.
The young folks are mostly right that the days of getting a decent, perhaps union, job with good security, great benefits and a secure retirement out of high school are pretty much gone. They are correct that success today almsot certainly requires at least a four-year college degree, if not more. And they are right that today, college costs are ridiculous compared to what they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. But they are wrong in assuming it was easy, or didn't come with its own need for hard work and sacrifice. Or that there was a good chance that the older ones may have been taken and sent off to war.
The older folks are mostly right that it's still possible. And that today's society makes it easier to throw yourself a pity party rather than roll up your sleeves, work smarter/harder and make it -- thus reinforcing the "we are screwed" meme. But fewer and fewer jobs today are providing health insurance, let alone a pension. Not to mention the aspect of entitlement reforms that is sure to eventually come down hardest on younger workers, and the ballooning debt that will disproportionately crush younger dreams rather than older ones. And while there are certainly ways to avoid massive college costs, overall college costs in real terms are several times higher than they were in, say, the 1960s or 1970s. But using that as a crutch, as an excuse to not even try, is unacceptable.
Every generation has its defining challenges. They may be different, not necessarily much easier or much tougher to overcome, and our inability to relate to the realities (actual or perceived) of others spurs us on to try to compare who had it worse, as if we want to be martyrs. Seems silly to me.
The sooner we can get past this "who had it harder" generational warfare stuff, the better, IMO. It's less a matter of who had it better as it is that the challenges are simply a lot different, and different generations can't really relate to them (in many cases) with their own experiences and observations, making us sound like the Four Yorkshiremen. Too much of our media culture is designed to pit one half of the people against the other half, along social lines, political lines, economic lines, racial lines, gender lines, generational lines, even about favorite sports teams. Media know that controversy and treating things like an us-versus-them, zero-sum game is good for their ratings (just look at the toxic comment sections), and we need to be better and smarter than to keep falling for it and letting them keep pitting good, ordinary folks against each other. Mainstream media create these frictional sparks of divisiveness, and then social media pour gasoline on them.
"The death of the American Dream" is right up there with the "Death of Equities".